At he 2001 RAE and previous ones, each higher educational institution had to
provide paper copies - usually photocopies - of all the papers submitted by
any members of its staff as their four chosen papers. The unproductive work
involved for universities to achieve this was substantial and expensive. And
as the copying was not 'for personal study or research', but rather for
administrative purposes, there could have been even more wasted effort and
expense in getting copyright permission for each and every one. Fortunately
a degree of sanity prevailed and a blanket copying licence was agreed for
this specific purpose.

For the 2008 RAE a further degree of sanity is injected, in that electronic
access is required to be provided. If all of the scholally literature was
available on OA by then, no problem would arise. Sadly, that is unlikely to
be achieved by that date. So a similar blanket agreement is required, for
electronic copies this time.

However, there is a very strong argument for Institutional Repositories
here. If an HEI had managed by 2008 to get an IR set up which had all of
the published work of its staff (at least post-2000) mounted on it, then the
university could fulfil the requirements for the RAE submission very
readily. If some of the publishers would not permit OA to the articles for
which they hold the copyright, the articles could still be included in the
IR but access to them could be limited to the RAE panels, under the
agreement with the PLS.

My own university already maintains a database of *references* to all of its
staff's output. Links from this database to the IR could provide the full
texts.